“George Valentine Dureau: Life and Artwork in New Orleans” by Howard Philips Smith, College of Mississippi Press, 520 pages
The enduring New Orleans artist George Valentine Dureau was “named for 2 saints,” his buddy W. Kenneth Holditch noticed, “one who fought dragons, one who grew to become the very image of affection.”
The warrior and the lover: he wore this dichotomy effectively, in line with Howard Philips Smith’s monumental survey of Dureau’s life and creative profession.
The primary draw right here, particularly for longtime Dureau followers, would be the 100 beforehand unseen and unpublished large-format images, taken from contact sheets housed on the Historic New Orleans Assortment. However simply as revelatory is a sequence of absorbing essays, written by Smith, the writer of a number of earlier books on New Orleans artwork and historical past, together with the indispensable “Unveiling the Muse: The Misplaced Historical past of Homosexual Carnival in New Orleans” from 2017.
Born in 1930 and raised within the Bayou St. John neighborhood, Dureau first exhibited his work on the age of 11, then went on to review artwork at LSU and structure at Tulane. Induction into the military briefly interrupted his nascent profession in 1954, when he enlisted within the Navy Police Corps. He gained notoriety for having fun with a weekend tryst with an AWOL soldier he was ordered to escort again to base.
Again in New Orleans, after a stint as a Canal Road window dresser, he pledged to dedicate his life to artwork.
He first discovered success together with his 1964 portray, “Fats Tuesday, Ready for Comus,” which led to a solo exhibition on the Isaac Delgado Museum of Artwork, in the present day’s New Orleans Museum of Artwork. The composition is a superb bait-and-switch. A scattering of figures stand, palms on hips and searching bored, presumably ready for the parade to reach — a true-to-life Mardi Gras second if there ever was one.
The portray’s solely carnivalesque element is the sultry purple road on which they linger.
Two years later, Dureau decamped to the capital of the artwork world for six months. However New York Metropolis’s galleries discovered his work to be retro.
Writer Howard Philips Smith
“I used to be type of reinventing determine portray. It was very a lot out of favor,” he admitted years later. “Everybody was being summary.”
Dureau doubled down, refocusing his artwork on usually nude portraits of males. A 1971 Royal Road present was greeted with derision.
“The artist is seemingly on a Michelangelo binge,” the Occasions-Picayune’s artwork critic sneered, evaluating his current work to “a damaged report repeating a groove over and over and over.”
Stung, Dureau settled into seclusion, refusing to showcase his work for a half-dozen years.
He returned to the scene with a 1977 mid-career retrospective held on the newly opened Modern Arts Middle, the bold floor zero within the transformation of a downtown neighborhood of derelict warehouses right into a Southern SoHo. Alongside his work, Dureau, who was White, hung a number of current images: easy road portraits of Black laborers.
The impetus for choosing up his digicam was a blockbuster Diane Arbus retrospective on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, which finally traveled to New Orleans. For Dureau, Arbus’ intimate black-and-white images of individuals dwelling on society’s fringes proved a revelation.
A follow-up exhibit in 1979, titled “Pictures of Males” and held on the newly opened and immediately electrifying Galerie Deville, signaled a trajectory that instantly made Dureau an area legend and heralded the route his life’s work would take.
“Dureau by some means manipulates this troublesome topic into probably the most stunning artwork,” the Occasions-Picayune raved this time. “Solely a particular love for humanity might impact this.”
Following Arbus’s lead, his portraits captured New Orleans’s most oppressed and maligned people stylized within the heroic, nude Greco-Roman type. Black males, dwarfs and folks with bodily disabilities, particularly amputees. Queer drifters, grifters and bohemians.
“He grew to become identified,” Smith writes, “for locating magnificence within the grotesque, the marginalized, the forgotten and equally within the sensual, the engaging, the beauteous.”
In contrast to Arbus, Dureau would nearly solely shoot in a sequence of French Quarter studio-homes. Safer areas, little question, for his creative imaginative and prescient. Dureau’s photographs usually function full-frontal male nudity. He’d roam New Orleans in his black Jeep trawling for fashions, a lot of whom grew to become his lovers.
He possessed, in line with one buddy and mannequin, an “nearly unique insistence on the flesh.”
That creative insistence seized the eye of Robert Mapplethorpe, a younger New York photographer 16 years Dureau’s junior. By the point the budding artist visited New Orleans within the mid-to-late Seventies, he had “turn into obsessed,” in Smith’s phrases, with the native legend-in-the-making. The photographers grew to become quick buddies, photographing one another and cruising homosexual bars collectively for fashions and hookups.
Mapplethorpe, who died from an AIDS-related sickness in 1989, would turn into one of many defining American artists of the twentieth century. Dureau couldn’t assist however really feel snubbed. Right this moment, he stays obscure exterior New Orleans.
Smith makes an attempt to decipher what he calls the artist’s “jigsaw-puzzle life” with a story that’s equally fragmentary, typically to a fault. He transports readers into Dureau’s disorderly studio kingdom: stacks of biographies of obscure saints, twisted tubes of paint, three silver pitchers — “one from every of the artist’s mom’s marriages.”
The “golden decade” of the Eighties, when Dureau dominated town’s downtown bohemia, is brilliantly delivered to life.
However frequent narrative shifts produce a timeline that may be troublesome to observe. And an extended essay specializing in Dureau’s art-world contemporaries falls flat.
The writer is unafraid to disclose that Dureau might at instances personify the artist as a monster. He struggled with alcoholism, alienated many buddies and lovers and was aggressively self-absorbed, ceaselessly referring to himself within the third individual. Since Dureau’s dying in 2014, critics, together with Smith, have questioned his motives. This survey asks the reader to contemplate: Have been Dureau’s images supportive or exploitative?
Dureau, maybe, would reply that they have been each.
“All of us are painfully insufficient in a technique or one other,” he mentioned in a 1979 interview nationally broadcast on ABC. “I feel that is essential, to create from sad concepts.”
Rien Fertel is the writer of 4 books, together with, most just lately, “Brown Pelican.”
